All the masks, all the characters he made of herself … all the Anaïs Nin are drawn with a single color pencil, of those infant pencils of multicolor tip.
“There is some random and magical in the stroke of various colors.
Many times I do not know what color will come out.
It is almost a metaphor of anaïs itself, from her personalities: the writer, the flamenco dancer, the wife, the lover … », says Léonie Bischoff while drawing a portrait of Anaïs Nin with that magical pencil, spent and
So easy ..
It is in a cafeteria in the center of Barcelona, just two streets from the building where the little Anaïs lived with her brothers and her mother after her father, the composer Joaquín Nin, was abandoned by a young man-and wealthy-student.
It was here, in the typical building of Eixample, when an 10-year-old anaïs began to write letters aimed at her father and, months later, on the boat she left to the United States, her first diary.
Anaïs Nin has been counted (left more than 35,000 pages written) and has had it in many ways: essays, plays, movies (the emblematic Henry and June of the 90, with Maria de Medeiros as the writer) and even a new
Series, Little Birds, based on his erotic stories and starring Rossy de Palma.
But Léonie Bischoff, a Swiss artist agreed in Brussels, resurrected her with a poetic graphic novel, in a sea of lies (Garbuix Books), which goes beyond the biography: his pencil and watercolor draw the words of Anaïs Nin, his desires and
Frustrations
Based on his own newspapers and in the correspondence he kept with the novelist Henry Miller, the comic focuses on the 30s, when Anaïs was looking for his voice as a writer while he was struggling between his perfect (and boring) marriage with Hugo and that relationship to
Three with Miller and his wife June, while maintaining various affair (his homosexual cousin, his two psychoanalysts) and the turbid episode of incest with his father.
“The modernity of Anaïs Nin does not only reside in the free life he led, at that Poliamor Avant the Lettre … understood before the idea that the intimate is political, that talking about his private and personal relationships is political.
It is something that feminism and the LGTBI community vindicated a lot after: the world makes society.
Anaïs was not a militant, he did not want to change the society or fight for law, he only claimed his own freedom, “says Bischoff, who for eight years his adaptation of Camilla Lackerg novels to the comic with this graphic tribute to Anaïs Nin.
“I read enough biographies about it, they helped me take data and information, but they enervated me.
It seemed to me that they were judging it in a very hard way, from a Judeo-Christian perspective.
Even a biography written by a woman.
She was so moraling … »adds her.
Anaïs Nin escaped that moral writing in his two newspapers: one official, that her husband could read;
And the other secret, in which she told her the clandestine adventures of her, the darkest fantasies of her.
When she met Henry Miller, the American without money that had just arrived in Paris (and that he had left in the USA to his first wife and his son to marry the young June), the crush was literary.
When she met June, the crush was even more brutal.
Of that strange Mélange à trois, Bischoff not only narrates the sentimental implications, also the literary construction he supposed for Miller and Nin.
On a single page plasma the Miller-Nin opposition, its two ways to understand the writing: the raw and rose prose of it in front of the beauty and abstraction that she did language.
Bischoff draws Miller with a scalpel, dissecting June as if it were an autopsy, leaving at sight his internal organs, literary material for him.
“Anaïs wants to fight Henry scalpel, and she uses that word.
They are two visions of how to seek the truth: for him you have to sink into ugliness, the viscera, the sordid.
For her the truth is in the masks, in appearances, “he says.
In a sea of lies is a bright comic, clear line and beautiful illustrations.
There is only one page in black, as if it were a photographic negative.
It is the most difficult scene, the great taboo: that night in which Anaïs maintained relationships with her father … a father who already made her naked photos and touched her being a girl.
“It was the most complex scene to draw.
She occupies many pages of her diary and writes it very descriptive, almost pornographic, but at the same time she feels that she is frozen and horrified inside her.
There is that psychological phenomenon of dissociation of victims of sex traumas.
She could not omit it.
It is too extreme and also fundamental in the mental construction of Anaïs’ relations with men, “explains Bischoff.
If Anaïs Nin wrote the unspeakable, the disturbing sensations but also intuitions and hope, Bischoff draws it from an impressionist sobriety.
With a simple color pencil.
